John Muir Worth Celebrating on State Quarter

by William Tweed

Commentary in Visalia Times Delta, April 10, 2004

The recent announcement that the California quarter will feature John Muir continues a long-term state tradition. Surveys over the decades have suggested that in California, more things have been named after this 19th century naturalist than any other person in state history.

How is it that this Scottish-born fruit rancher, who died in 1914, has come to fill such a prominent spot in our culture?

The outlines of Muir's life are familiar to many Californians. Born in Scotland on the shores of the North Sea, Muir came as a child to the Midwest, growing up in Wisconsin. As a young man, he left that world to explore others, ending up in 1869 in California, where he immediately found work as a sheepherder in the high Sierra County east of Yosemite Valley.

There, he found a world that would hold his attention for the rest of his life.

For the next decade Muir explored the forested canyons and high country of his beloved Sierra Nevada. Often wandering alone for weeks, Muir came to know the range better than almost anyone else. It was during these years that he named Sequoia National Park's Giant Forest.

In 1880, Muir's life changed abruptly. He married and took over the management of a large fruit ranch operation owned by his wife's family near Martinez. For the next decade he farmed, building a secure life for his wife and their two small daughters.

By 1890, Muir's attention shifted again. His thoughts returned to California's wildlands, but not this time as places to explore, but rather as wild treasures needing protection. It was this John Muir who founded the Sierra Club in 1893 and who went on to write a long series of popular books, most of which remain in print to this day.

By the time Muir died in 1914, he had become something approaching the secular patron saint of California.

Today, Muir's name seems to be everywhere. There is a John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada, but also a John Muir Freeway in Contra Costa County.

There are numerous John Muir schools and parks. His name is attached to native plants like Muir's Ivesia, a high country species.

In the back country of Kings Canyon National Park you can hike on the John Muir Trail to Muir Pass, where the Muir Hut, built in 1931 by the Sierra Club, which Muir founded, still shelters passing hikers.

On either side of the pass the trails wends its way past lakes named for Wanda and Helen, his two daughters. Sequoia National Park has a 14,000-foot peak named Mount Muir, as well as the Muir Grove of giant sequoias.

Why is it that Muir still resonates so strongly with Californians? The answer, I suspect, is that more than anyone else, Muir is the man who defined so much of what we value about California today.

Muir's California is Yosemite Valley and the high Sierra; it is spring wildflowers and roaring mountain rivers.

It is the enduring world of nature that still surrounds us, even as we continue to enlarge our cities and extend our technologies.

It is this view of California, I believe, that our new coin seeks to invoke. It is no accident that Muir will share the coin with images of Yosemite Valley and a California condor. On the coin Muir will add his visage to a California that he literally defined -- a place of almost unimaginable scenic splendor and the home of amazing creatures such as the continent's largest birds.

William Tweed is the chief naturalist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
To ask him questions, write: William Tweed, Visalia Times-Delta, P.O. Box 31, Visalia, CA 93277.

Originally published Saturday, April 10, 2004 in the Visalia Times Delta.

Reprinted on the John Muir Exhibit by permission of William Tweed.